To navigate the realities of building rapport in a virtual-first world, remember “the three Rs.”

From apps that boost focus to trivia that builds team morale, here are our top recommendations for remote working tools to keep distributed teams at the top of their game. Lilly Shor, Content Manager, Craft.io With the pandemic still in full swing worldwide, teams that turned remote overnight are now grappling with the ongoing challenges faced by distributed teams. And at least for the foreseeable future, it looks like remote work is here to stay.

There’s no doubt that your company benefits when employees are actively interested in their work. A recent Gallup survey revealed that highly engaged employees are more productive, have higher customer ratings, and are more likely to stay with the company. The value of employee engagement may seem obvious to you as a manager. Even so, many organizations struggle to keep employees interested in their work. Worldwide, just 15% of employees are engaged.

As a researcher interested in teamwork and team effectiveness, March 2020 was a fascinating moment for me. Around the world, knowledge workers at organisations large and small were suddenly forced to work from their homes. As we scrambled to get a read on the effect this was having inside Atlassian, we also commissioned an international, multimodal study to capture and make sense of the impact on individuals and teams across a range of industries as they grappled with these extraordinary changes.

Reimagining work and management for a more flexible, productive and balanced future

Introducing new product innovations to help teams to collaborate, connect to their partners and systems and get work done.

How the team behind Kooth collaborates in Slack to align on messaging and deliver real-time online therapeutic support to more than 5 million people.

The Future Forum launches the Remote employee experience index to help organisations to redesign work

Stories of great customer experiences often go viral because they’re exceptional outliers. An airline saves the day by flying out a bridesmaid dress, or a support rep saves a life by realizing the caller was having a stroke. “We tend to think of customer experience as these big old moonshots, and going above and beyond, and just knocking socks off,” says Samantha Chandler, one of Zendesk’s customer success team managers.

Don’t bother choosing between speed and quality when it comes to customer experience, because businesses need both to be among the best. Speed plus effectiveness is the formula for CX success, according to findings by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Research. Leading CX orgs are customer-centric to the hilt; they resolve customer issues more quickly, all while handling more customer requests overall and engaging with those customers on more channels.